Halls of Torment News

[h2]Greetings Champions![/h2]

It’s time for another small update. As we said in our last update, we’d still like to start the beta for the next big update in July, which we will do just right in time on Monday the 31st July. Today we want to talk about how you can participate in the update beta and what to expect. If things are unclear, please let us know.


[h3]Joining the Beta Branch[/h3]
You can freely join the Beta, by going into your games properties from the Steam library (right-click the game or “manage”). There will be a page called Betas where you can set the game version you want to play on.

You can freely switch between the live and beta version, but switching back to the live version might remove some progress from the save game. But usually the unlocked progress will simply not be available in previous versions (new stages, characters, items etc.)


[h3]Contents & State of the Beta[/h3]
When you join the beta, be aware that most features are not complete and content will get added over time. While most of the foundations are done and the addition of new parts will be quick, there are some points to be aware of.

• Assets are not final and some content will be using place holders (enemies, items, abilities…)
  
• Not all quests and unlocks will be added.
  
• Unlocks bound to quests will automatically be available once the content gets added.
  
• Content and balancing might be vastly reworked during the beta as many content items have not been tested in depth.
  
• The beta is not feature complete, additional features will be finished during the beta.
  

[h3]Duration & Updates of the Beta[/h3]
We don’t have a fixed schedule, but depending on the progress and problems, we believe the beta will take 2-4 weeks for an update as big as this one. For the duration of the beta we’ll do irregular updates and not every update will get an additional announcement. Those changes will be added either to the previous beta notes or the steam forums.


[h3]Reporting & Communication for the Beta[/h3]
We added a sub forum to the Steam Forums, where we’ll share all information about the beta and encourage all reports and feedback for the beta branch to be posted in that forum.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/2218750/discussions/3/

Please note, the forum will be locked outside of beta phases.

You can also join the discord, we’ll also have a channel there to talk about the beta!
https://discord.gg/chasingcarrots



[h3]Beta Preview[/h3]
As many of you await new content, please allow me to give you a short list of content the beta will most likely start with! This may change as we are currently still preparing the beta content.

• New stage “Frozen Depths”
  
• Agony game mode (not final yet)
  
• Balancing changes to characters, traits, items and abilities
  
• Up to 2 of the 4 new abilities.
  
• 1 of the 2 new characters.
  
• Many smaller changes and additions
  
• Stability updates & engine upgrade
  

More details on all changes will be provided when the Beta starts!


[h3]New Achievements & Quests[/h3]
Yes, there will be new achievements alongside new quests. The new achievements will be added for the release of the update. If you participate in the beta and complete the connected quests beforehand, the achievements will unlock once you start the regular game after the patch release.

New quests will be added and modified during the beta. If any unlockable gets added retroactively to a quest, these will be made available without the requirement to finish the quest again. This does not apply to added or changed gold rewards.


Stay Fresh
- Chasing Carrots

[h2]Hello Adventurers![/h2]

Here is a small summary of the past week's progress. We’ve taken slightly longer than anticipated, but we’d still like to start the beta for that patch within July. The release of the update is to be expected in August. The beta will not start with the full content, but with everything that’s been finished at that time.

So what were the biggest changes we’ve been working on in the past weeks?
Note: Details in screenshots and information might change, everything is WIP


[h2]Frozen Depths[/h2]


The Frozen Depths are the 4th stage that will be available. Following the previous stages, this stage will become harder and more complex. As the name suggests, the stage is going to be freezing cold, as will be the included new mechanics and enemies.



We had to make monster AI a bit smarter in order for it to navigate through a cave-like system. The cave structure will not only limit your movement, it will also enable you to plan ahead on how and where to engage enemies. It’s our first approach to more complex level layouts. To not make things more interesting, we are also going to add a few new behaviours and patterns to enemies!



Besides some new cold hearted enemies, we’ll also introduce the ice element with new abilities and characters. But those are not ready for the beta test, yet. Just this much: Ice will not slow down enemies :)


[h2]Agony[/h2]


Agony is the first step of many to add new challenges and difficulties to the game. We had to rework some systems internally to make the monsters and spawning more flexible. This limited the amount of work we could get done on this front. For now Agony will be a simple toggle in the Register of Halls that can be enabled if you have defeated the Lord of the Hall.



With raising agony, champion enemies with some additional mobs will appear. The champions are randomized encounters that appear more frequent and grow stronger the better you play. Champions have special modifiers, making them shoot fireballs or use abilities, sometimes being simply stronger or faster. Those champions will reward you with additional drops of items, abilities and gold.

But champions are not the only new challenge. All enemies will grow more resilient and in numbers with a higher agony rating. To raise the agony, one simply needs to slay many monsters as quickly as possible!


[h2]Balancing[/h2]


Player characters are undergoing some changes right now. Especially early characters will be refitted with new traits so they follow the trait patterns of later characters. They will receive more general usage traits that don’t focus on the main attack only. In the future, every character and ability will have a crit bonus value above 0, which means that they can all crit and critical hits can be more universally used. Also in the works are boni on level ups depending on the player character, like for example “5 max health per level”, or a heal effect on each level up. In the future we want to expand on this, so it can go beyond simple passive stat boosts.



Furthermore, hit effects will get a couple of changes. Debuff effects will be toned down from 10% to 5% while all elemental effects will be capped to stacks of 20. Burn was already limited, but Electrify will now be limited as well. In exchange for this, when applying another elemental effect stack, the stack will deal direct damage and reset all timers which allows for better damage upscaling.

The last thing regarding elemental damage is that buffs that were increasing elemental damage will now affect the damage effects instead of the direct damage. For example, Fire Blessing will from now on increase the strength of the burn effect instead of the direct fire damage dealt.



The bonus XP from completed quests is being rebalanced as well. The XP boost was rather strong and we will be adding more and more quests, so over time we’ll have to reduce the bonus you gain from quests. With this update we are doing the first step with a reduction to 0.33% per quest.


[h2]Other Changes[/h2]

There are many other changes, smaller and bigger ones, that will have an impact on how the game plays.

Force will be introduced as a new stat value, replacing pierce and duration, combining them into a single stat. Force will also be used to increase knockback from melee attacks and to mitigate damage reduction of projectiles when piercing enemies. It may also apply to some more exotic stats in the future, but those will be denoted in respective descriptions. Duration buffs will all be changed to force buffs, the trait Piercing Wind has been changed to add a base crit bonus to all characters and abilities.

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Wordings for effects are going to be unified. When releasing into early access, we had no unified system for how to describe how values affect character stats and it wasn’t always clear whether modifiers were multiplicative or additive. In the future additive bonuses will always include the keyword “base” and be non-% values, while all %-values will be added up and used as a multiplier on the base values.

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There are 2 new potions coming up: one to reroll items and one to reroll abilities. Those are still WIP in terms of unlocking, but they are functional in the game.

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The Lords of Ember Grounds and the Viaduct will be changed to have less health and scale in difficulty as time passes, just as the Lord of Pain in the first level. The additional projectiles and indestructible guards will no longer be valid targets for abilities and auto-aim.

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We’ve upgraded the Godot Engine to version 4.1. This includes many potential fixes for various engine level issues. It will not fix everything and we are expecting more work to be done. But the engine upgrade will also enable us to further optimize the game in the future.
A big Thank You to all the Godot Collaborators developing and maintaining the engine!

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Please note that all the above is work in progress and we continue to add more content. It’s just a short overview of what we’ve done during the past few weeks. Once we can ensure a stable beta, we’re going to make it available for everyone who wants to give us feedback while the work on the next proper update continues.

Have a nice week!
Chasing Carrots

[h2]Hello all![/h2]

Short update to fix two issues.
First of the Arcane Charging I trait has a proper description now.

But more importantly, the Potion of Oblivion had a bug that when banishing a sub group of traits, it did in fact not banish anything at all. This was fixed and if you banish now a trait from one group, eg. "Arcane Splinter I (Charging)", it should ban all (Charging) traits.

Thanks for the reports.

[h3]Cheers
- Chasing Carrots[/h3]

[h2]Hello Adventurers![/h2]

We hope you have a lot of fun down in the Halls of Torment. Before moving on to adding new halls, abilities, and playable characters, we wanted to clean up a couple of things and add a sorely missed feature: trait rerolls and banishes. Those will be added in the form of a new NPC which we’ve already covered in our previous Dev Journal.

Besides that, we took some time to fix some issues and usability inconveniences. We are aware of more problems that still aren’t fixed, yet, and we keep on working on solutions for those. Your feedback is, as always, very appreciated. We want to thank you for supporting us and helping out by reporting problems you encounter.


[h2]Change Log | 2023-06-27[/h2]
[h3]FEATURES[/h3]

• New NPC: Cupbearer!
  
• Quest to rescue the Cupbearer
  
• The trait selection can have Reroll, Banish, Memorize, and Double Potions
  
• Collect ingredients to unlock all the potions
  
• Collect bottles to increase the amount of each potion
  
• New Item: Gatherer’s Charm (automatically acquired when Cupbearer has been rescued)
  
• for more details see our Dev Journal #4

[h3]POLISH & QOL[/h3]

• Item pickup from chests is more intuitive now. The new item will be equipped when the slot is unoccupied, otherwise it will be put into the bag. When the bag is also full, the player first has to make space or discard the chest items.
  
• Improved Golem roll and attack behavior
  
• Improved Imp and Skeleton Summons movement speed and steering
  
• Wraith lance attacks will also play a sound now (Lord of Despair and Wraith Horseman)
  
• Ability Scrolls in the world are sometimes guarded by an elite monster
  
• Performance with lots of XP Gems lying around should now be way better. There should also be no massive slowdowns when picking up a Hand of Greed anymore.
  
• Integrated Godot “delta smoothing” for smother gameplay when the game runs at the vsync limit
  
• Item well state (retrieved, owned, etc.) is not displayed if the Wellkeeper has not been rescued.
  
• Invocator’s Grasp got its own item graphic.
  
• Removed some very loud low frequencies in Exterminator’s fire sound which caused some players to complain about its loudness.
  
• Better sound for breaking pots on Ember Grounds.
  
• Improved death animation of Gargoyles.
  

[h3]BUG FIXES[/h3]

• Added an error message to the start of the game when Steam could not be initialized. Should fix profile save/load problems.
  
• Fixed input problems with a few more controllers (XBox One Wireless and a few other XBox controllers)
  
• Fixed Lord of Despair lance attack animations.
  
• Overworld selection input when using a mouse to select and keys to walk around works better now.
  
• Fixing that left-click for auto-aim override would disable attacks with auto-attack.
  
• Wrong configuration for Golem and Transfixion blocked 2nd Upgrades to pop up.
  

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
We’re already in the middle of developing new content for the next update. This includes a new stage and new playable characters. There’s also some balancing work going on which didn’t make it into this update but will hopefully be ready for the next one. We also hope to be able to introduce a new mechanic alongside the new content that would spice things up a little bit. But more on that in a future update!

[h3]Stay Fresh! 🥕
- Chasing Carrots[/h3]